


stone cold sober

by ilovehawkeye



Category: American Horror Story, The Last of Us
Genre: AHS seasons crossover, Angst, Bioshock Infinite references, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Porn Without Plot Without Porn, The Last of Us-verse, post TLoU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 11:49:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1265419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilovehawkeye/pseuds/ilovehawkeye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What’s hell if not the complete circle? Life feels like this anyway; Misty just follows the nature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stone cold sober

**Author's Note:**

> So it's a tlou-au fic; about six years after the game's ending. Misty's about 20-21 years old and Lana's in her late twenties.
> 
> English still isn't my native language, so feel free to correct me if anything feels linguistically awkward.
> 
> I tried to make it as friendly for those who haven't played yet as possible. Be aware of spoilers.

_I've struggled for a long time with survivin'. No matter what, you just keep finding something to fight for._

 

Misty sees her for the first time at his funeral; she smokes in the back of the chapel, the cigarette is mincingly between her long fingers near her lips and the smoke hangs heavily over her head.

He was ill; he spent his last two years in the bed, coughing and swearing – what a pun – at anyone who wasn’t Misty. His legs failed him, so he couldn’t walk, and his back ached so much that he asked Misty to help him turn from side to side; she remembers very clear his husky voice at night, frighten and angry and pitiful.

Tommy said, he was afraid of death at nights, as everybody is when they feel their end coming; but Misty thinks he was rather afraid of her leaving him and he still being alive after that – alone and helpless, face to face with his guilt and shadows from the past. She could see them in his eyes.

And she wanted to leave, god knows how much; to leave that man who had destroyed her very soul. He marked her with his choice; poisoned with his guilt. He knew just perfectly that she’d understood everything but acted hypocritically trying to play it like she hadn’t.

He also loved her, very much; too much. And she probably loved him back just as well; and hated even more, but it doesn’t count now, when he’s dead and she has to tell the speech in front of the whole community.

A goddess of mercy, the queen of resurgence, crying for her loyal guardian angel; that’s what they think. And cries, cries, cries; but not for him. They all didn’t know who stole their only chance to survive, and for the first time since that moment on that hill she cries for the whole slowly dying humanity; cries for the first time since then at all.

She cries and speaks about what a good father role-model Joel was, how much he cared for her and the community and how much he wanted it to prosper; only Tommy here knows what a bullshit she tells everyone, eyes full of pain and hatred deep under gloomy concern. He doesn’t know the whole story, but he does know his own brother, so nothing can fool him. Misty loves him and she’s grateful that he’s never asked her so she has never had a chance to ruin these castles in the air.

So she speaks and wipes her eyes; feels pain filling the emptiness inside her already; Misty’s like a puzzle with pieces made of agony, and they are patiently collecting into the whole disgusting yet desirable picture; the woman watches her through the smoke, over the heads of praying crowd, with lazy curiosity. Misty doesn’t know her yet; she’s probably come with the latest caravan from god-fucking-knows-where just yesterday – when Misty was busy wrapping the body up in white sheet, so she doesn’t even know her name.

But what she does know, even after one quick look, is that she is very fucking alike with Cordelia – and Misty almost rushes through the crowd to hit her, to punch her shitty face asking why she’s alive; but there is something which tells her she’s not her old friend. Misty just finishes her speech with a shy smile and a nod and wipes cheeks; it must be the light and the smoke and the smell of labdanum that makes joke on her.

Her voice is also very alike with Cordelia’s, with too soft, lisping pronunciation. Misty dumbly watches her big lips moving smoothly as she speaks to her next day in the canteen; her voice is a bit arrogant and edgy, but sweet and again-

“Aren’t you hot wearing this shirt?”

Lana folds her arms and gazes intensely; Misty blinks dully and smiles crookedly, scratching the bite through the sleeve.

“It’s Lana anyway.”

“Misty.”

Lana lights up a cigarette as her salver is full of potato mash and meatballs: “I know.”

Misty wants to blurt she’s waiting for her in the hospital but they have had enough patients thanks to the hole in the fence lately, so it would probably sound too out of place. She just watches puke-like looking food plopping down her salver and swallows her words and the very wish to say them. She can feel the pain of squashed potato just fine – the same happened to the little cocky girl she was, and now she can feel the remains flowing down her responsibility, smelling of decay.

But she still comes, without an invitation or need; she asks for painkillers – like, her head is pounding – but Misty sees how carefully and attentively she scans the surgery and herself; sees the hunger behind arrogance. She’s pain junky, no matter if she knows herself; and Misty doesn’t waste her supplies for stupid excuses. She offers four leather belts and a cold stethoscope instead; who could ever guess that listening to the rushing after climax heart can be so goddamn sexy. Misty herself doesn’t even take off her operating coat, though; Lana doesn’t ask her to. When she’s gone there is a builder from the dam with fistful of broken fingers.

It’s so quiet in their room now – in her room – that she starts thinking; like – do you remember that day in the mall? the game? the kiss?

Do you remember her last words?

Do you remember your own?

Nothing poetic, Misty thinks; nothing romantic – only decay and quick fuck on the medical table. No more flowers, no more games. In her dream young Joel from the photo shoots Cordelia as Misty watches, and Lana smokes behind his shoulder.

She has a record player, for real vinyl; Misty almost cries for all those records they saw back at her fourteens in Lincoln; hundreds of them. She listens to something called Fleetwood Mac sitting on Lana’s couch; the desk lamp twinkles as the record begins to squeak every fifteen seconds. Lana explains, it was damaged somehow, sometime; she never liked it, anyway. She changes it to another one – something jazzy, with drums that give Misty seasickness. When she’s too tired of it and of her shift – and of her life – Lana offers a joint, and they make sex again; she seems not to mind Misty being the only one in action again, and Misty can bare her indifference to doing her the favor in return just fine; at least she doesn’t have to undress herself.

She’d never had a chance to figure out what happened between them two in the mal; had never asked herself about who she’s into either. Maybe she just didn’t have time for all this, she thinks, with all those attempts to play Jesus.

Maybe she just didn’t want to.

She can recall the strange feel toward Tommy’s wife, Maria, though. She’s tough, smart, she protected her from Joel when Misty’d taken Tommy’s side in the argument about community expansion.

She also has a baby; Misty loves him, but blames him sometimes, when her thoughts and memories are especially confused, for not having enough attention – and love – from his mother. It’s not like she’d ever needed a mother; or love; just warmth.

Lana’s warm in her patched jacket and striped scarf; her arms are cold, though, when she touches Joel’s name on the brand new tombstone Misty’s helped to install above the empty grave.

“Is it a big loss?”

Misty shrugs – like, maybe; like, I don’t care. She goes toward the canteen, head down and arms in the pockets, feeling Lana’s gaze on her back. They never speak during this dinner, chewing their sandwiches; don’t speak after that in the too cold for their too hot skin kitchen either, failing to do dishes.

Misty’s afraid of the things Lana may ask; should ask, Misty believes, sooner or later; she just isn’t ready to know all this things about herself.

But days come and go, and Lana still doesn’t ask her – like, did you love Joel? Who was he for you, aside from all this bullshit about father-model? Misty plays with those marbles of thoughts in her head, washing her arms after dealing with Lana once again, right in his bed. Lana smokes, like she always does, and looks blankly at his stuff folded up on the chair; Misty still has no courage to take it to the store. She watches Lana through the mirror inhaling and exhaling fetid smoke, and wonders if she doesn’t ask her simply because Misty has just answered.

Tommy seems to want Misty in his administration rather than at the hospital; among the people Lana’s caravan has brought there is couple of good – real – doctors; so Misty spends her evenings in the old shabby city hall trying to read through Joel’s poor handwriting. The notes he made don’t include anything she hadn’t heard from him at home, but she manages to find some really good ideas in the pile of angry old man’s rants about how shitty and totally wrong Tommy’s view on trade and hunt are. She reads it with a smirk and cultivated skepticism when she finds a line with little crooked star before it saying there is a gap in the fence down the street in the south; Joel wrote, Tommy had to give him men to stop up the hole, and had to do it quickly until somebody or something could use it. It was the Wednesday, 22th; Joel died two weeks later; three days after she had covered some boy’s body with white sheet and cried in the corner of the surgery, hugging herself with bloody arms till they delivered another pack of wounded. Later she learnt they had shot and burned all the bitten ones right near the fence; it made up a dozen.

She meets Lana in the hall near Tommy’s office; they share some secrets behind his closed doors – secrets Misty feels she wouldn’t be happy to reveal. They don’t speak, though Misty feels she will slap Lana if she comes any closer and try to touch or hug or something, but there are other people here, so Lana hardly even nods in greeting and casts down her eyes. In his office, Misty just puts the note on Tommy’s desk; his office still smells like tobacco. He doesn’t even read it like he knows what it is, just watches her with gritted teeth and tears glittering in his eyes; she leaves before she learns if these are from anger or grief; before he speaks.

At home, she puts on Joel’s checkered shirt and whirls to the motive of the old gospel he sang every now and then; the shirt still smells like him and the words of hymn suddenly changes into Fleetwood Mac or how is it fucking called, and she can’t hold back the vomit anymore.

She doesn’t see Lana for something like half of a week after that; two or three men come to her to get their wills approved, like they always do when go with caravan knowing there is little hope to come back in one piece. She stamps it and tries to ask them, where and when and with whom they are going, with her eyes, but they never understand it and she never finds the courage to ask them properly.

She finds Lana in her room after work, smoking and looking at the picture of her and Cordelia they had taken in the photo booth ten minutes after both were bitten; something like two hours plus eternity before Cordelia died and left her alone.

“Is it a big loss?”

Misty stands in the door, gazing her insanely; like – are you fucking kidding me, Lana? who just smirks and inhales:

“What secrets do you keep?”

Misty just laughs and violently shakes her head; Lana meanwhile seems to be trying to kiss her – for the first time; but she never manages to reach her lips even cornering her with her hands around her head – one with cigarette, ashes falls on Misty’s shoulders.

“What secrets do _you_ keep?”

“The girl on the picture – I’m not her.”

Misty inhales the smoke Lana exhales with the words and swallows feelings of anger and déjà vu.

“I ain’t one either.”  

Her hand on Lana’s chest, holding her back when she tries to unbutton her shirt.

“Where’s she gone, then?’

“Hell.”

Lana moves away, the light of her cigarette dying, slowly and pitifully; when Lana touches the door handle, she adds just as pitifully and slowly:

“Ain’t no voice to follow.”

Lana hesitates for a moment, but says nothing.

It’s the end of the summer; it becomes hotter and hotter, and Misty’s shirt, the shirt which belonged to Joel once, is wet because of sweat when she uses the hole in the fence and goes to the hill with the urn with his ashes. She knows Lana’s following her though she was never invited; Misty hears her boots trample down dried up grass and crack sticks couple of meters behind.

It’s about ten minutes of wandering through the woods, when Lana finally asks her in quiet yet audible voice how far it’s now; Misty shrugs without turning her head. It’s just a little bit further, and it feels like rewind.

Let’s make the circle complete.

What’s hell if not the complete circle? Life feels like this anyway; Misty just follows the nature.

They stop, finally, turning to the town; Lana breaths heavily after climbing while Misty hardly can feel her heartbeat.

“Do ya think he’s gone to hell?”

Lana coughs, hand on the knees as she stoops to catch a breath; looks curiously.

“I can’t know.”

“Well, he has, twenty-six years ago.”

Misty turns off the lid and pours the ashes at the Tommy’s town; it’s black and white at whirls in the air a little bit before covering the grass.

“Hope he feels at home.”

“What secrets do you keep?”

Misty looks inside the urn and inhales; it smells like calm and love, and screams when she drops it and let it go downhill.

“I’m immune.”

Lana looks not at all impressed; just lights up a cigarette, like always: “Must be damn hot wearing the shirt all the time.”

“That’s not what ya’re to say.”

They watch clouds for several seconds; then Lana says with smoke catching on her lips: “Too bad it’s gonna rain.”, and Misty just goes like “swear to me.”

Lana’s eyes for the first time are something like gentle and warm, just as the eyes of the man who once had committed genocide without a second thought and without a second thought swore he hadn’t; Misty feels like the ashes swirling in the air, waiting for their turn to touch the ground when Lana shakes it off her cigarette.

“Swear to me that your voice’s worth following.”

Lana hesitates for a long, long second before dropping the fag end and looking her directly in the eyes, eyebrows are raised a little and voice is stubbornly serious and low and husky:

“I swear.”

And it feels like dying and reborn at once, the truly unbroken circle; ashes finally come to ashes, and Misty hears her own voice saying:

“Okay.”


End file.
